Revolutionising future aircraft design

BAE Systems Corporate Blog13 May 2019

At BAE Systems we are proud to be collaborating with some of the brightest minds at British universities to deliver ground-breaking research and innovation.

Our engineers worked with researchers at the University of Manchester to design and develop the MAGMA unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which successfully trialled two ‘flap-free’ technologies, paving the way for better performing aircraft that are lighter, more reliable and cheaper to operate. The technologies could also improve an aircraft’s stealth as they reduce the number of gaps and edges that currently make aircraft more observable on radar.

Find out how, for the first time in aviation history, we manoeuvred an aircraft in flight using supersonically blown air, removing the need for complex movable flight control surfaces.

MAGMASee how we manoeuvred an aircraft in flight using supersonically blown air